ODAWAS

Good morning friends! We’ve got a bit of a special treat to start off your Tuesday or maybe act as a soundtrack to what currently seems to be a monsoon outside. Odawas founder, Michael James Tapscott, releases his ninth album on Bookmaker Records. “Good Morning, Africa Working alternates captivating ballads and dark instrumental tracks. The result is a deep mix of folk songwriting, psychedelism and new age.” It features Andrew Kenower, who contributed some very interesting field recordings to the album. The first vinyl edition for Bookmaker (how neat!), you can stream and pre-order the album HERE.

Odawas’ Michael James Tapscott has a new, limited edition cassette called Challenger available now through Digitalis Industries. A collaboration with old friend and poet Andrew Kenower who provides some field recordings he made in Holland, the piece contains sonic thoughts and visions from NASA’s The Challenger disaster of 1986 and the human error that caused it. Much of the vision was provided by Chapter 2 from Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations. We’ve given this a suck a spin and it’s actually a lovely, deep listen.

About this time last year, the Tired Trails Collective label released a hyper-limited cassette called Mind of Christ, featuring all new music from San Francisco’s absolutely sublime Odawas. Now, the band has made that music available for free on its official site. The collection delves deeper into Odawas’ atmospheric acumen and dark experimentation. The first track is the band’s soundtrack for filmmaker Neil Blakemore’s Cannes-selected short film, Kill Yr. TV. The other tunes were sort of created opposite to how Odawas songs usually come to be, with synth-warlock Isaac Edwards handing over two experimental piece for to be given shape by songwriter Michael Tapscott.

Odawas’ Michael Taspcott often noted Eric Serra’s soundtrack for Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue” as the largest inspiration for Odawas’ 2009 longplayer The Blue Depths. Paired with his well-known love for Vangelis’ work on “Blade Runner” and “Antarctica,” it’s no secret Tapscott has a wide open heart for the soundtrack genre. Now, he’s lent his own talents to two film scores, both from director Neil Blakemore (who is incidentally no stranger to Jagjaguwar, using his mad bookkeeping skills to help keep us afloat back in the day.)